Buffalo in the ’50s: A quarter-million dollar Broadway/Fillmore bank heist

By Steve Cichon
steve@buffalostories.com
@stevebuffalo

The world was a different place in 1951.

Buffalo News archives

In July 1951, a gunman walked into the Buffalo Industrial Bank on Fillmore Avenue just south of Broadway with a blue steel pistol and walked out with $40,000 in cash ($366,000 in 2015 dollars).

The Buffalo Evening News was invited in to photograph the scene of the crime, complete with tellers and managers accounting for the stolen cash.

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Steve Cichon

Steve Cichon writes about Buffalo’s pop culture history. His stories of Buffalo's past have appeared more than 1600 times in The Buffalo News. He's a proud Buffalonian helping the world experience the city he loves. Since the earliest days of the internet, Cichon's been creating content celebrating the people, places, and ideas that make Buffalo unique and special. The 25-year veteran of Buffalo radio and television has written five books and curates The Buffalo Stories Archives-- hundreds of thousands of books, images, and audio/visual media which tell the stories of who we are in Western New York.